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asked if she knew Edith Kapana.
    “Aunty Edith? She wen maki .”
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    “Yes, we know she’s dead. That’s why we’re here.”
    The girl shivered. “I wen get all chicken skin when I heard.”
    As usual, Ray was baffled by the pidgin reference to goose bumps, but he nodded along. “How’d you know Edith?” I asked.
    The girl, who told us her name was Leelee, shrugged. “She da kine hanai tūtū . Maybe year ago, her house on the Big Island get buss up, she come live here.”
    I could see Ray getting frustrated. “A hanai relative is one you adopt,” I said to him. “Or maybe somebody you always think of as a sister or a cousin. So Aunty Edith’s not her real grandmother.”
    “She real kahiko ,” Leelee said. “Always want to sit around, talk story.” She hefted the baby on her hip. For a moment, he stopped crying and stared at us.
    Leelee gave us permission to take a look around the room where Edith had lived, in what had once been the garage. “What was that she called her, kahiko?” Ray asked when we were alone.
    “Old-fashioned. Someone who likes to do things the old way,”
    I said, snooping around the piles of newspaper clippings and photocopies of legal documents on the desk. There was nothing much else in Edith’s room other than some cheap furniture, a few books about Hawai’i, family snapshots thumb-tacked to the walls and a couple of photo albums.
    “Doesn’t look like anyone killed her for her money,” Ray said.
    I agreed. When we went back to the living room, Leelee said the house belonged to her uncle, but he was often drunk and didn’t come home much. Her boyfriend, Dex, was at work, leaving her with the baby. I asked Leelee for Dex’s full name, as well as her uncle’s name.
    “What you want that for?”
    “We need to talk to them. My boss will look at stuff like that.
    You know how it is with paperwork. He wants every ‘’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed.”
    Leelee looked like punctuation wasn’t her specialty. She toed the carpet for a while, then said, “My uncle don’t live here no MAhu BLood 23
    more.” She met my eyes. “But you can’t tell da kine people from the OHA. Me and Dex, we don’t qualify for homestead.”
    The Office of Hawaiian Affairs controlled housing on homestead land. “Don’t worry, Leelee, we won’t rat you out.”
    Her body relaxed. “Trale. Dexter Trale.” She spelled it for us, though I could see it was an effort.
    “Here’s my card, with my cell number. You have Dexter call me, all right?”
    She took the card, and the baby started crying again. I wondered if Leelee ever changed him—because he smelled ripe when we arrived, and he still did when we left.
    “How old do you think she is?” Ray asked, as we walked down the driveway.
    “Fifteen, sixteen.”
    “She looked pretty overwhelmed.”
    “I’ll bet Aunty Edith helped her with the baby. She’ll have to get some other aunty to help out now.”
    “You think we ought to call social services?”
    “The baby didn’t seem to be in any danger. Sure, Leelee’s a kid herself. But half the people on this homestead are probably related to her. They’ll help out. Hawaiians take care of their own.”
    We drove around the neighborhood, stopping to talk to anyone on the street, in yards or on porches. We didn’t get the warmest reception; most of the time when the cops come to Papakolea, they’re looking to arrest someone. People tried to ignore us, and when they spoke, it was only to me. Ray’s white skin rendered him invisible.
    It took a lot of persuading, but a few people admitted knowing Aunty Edith. Leelee’s uncle was either Edith’s nephew, her cousin or her husband’s grandson, depending on who you talked to. There was general consensus that she had lived on the Big Island, somewhere on the slopes of Kilauea, until her house had been swallowed up by the pahoehoe .
    24 Neil S. Plakcy
    “A kind of lava,” I told Ray, as we walked back to the